- cross-posted to:
- ghazi@lemmy.blahaj.zone
- cross-posted to:
- ghazi@lemmy.blahaj.zone
You must log in or register to comment.
At this point they are making it clear they are nothing more than thugs and hucksters; and that they have the right to stole everything on the internet to push their lip products. Fuck open ai an all of their cronies.
So glad people finally waking up to these things being power plays.
Republicans, Evangelical Christians, and now Techbros are all running on the same script which boils down to “rules for thee, not for me.”
Being a hypocrite is simply showing others you have the power to be a hypocrite and all they can do is get mad and stomp their feet. It’s why the right wing loves to “trigger liberals.” It’s not even about actual politics or religion anymore, it’s just simply “might makes right.”
These are expressions of power, plain and simple. They should always be viewed as such.
I mean, so many companies pirated tons of materials to train their LLMs and they are making way more money than the guys at the Pirate Bay ever did. It’s almost like because the guys at the Pirate Bay were making small potatoes money that they were worth going after. It’s almost like if you crime big enough, the world will just pat you on the back and say “good job” instead.
Meta was literally caught downloading Anna’s Archive and the widely used by nearly every AI company books3 corpus was everything from private torrent tracker Bibliotik. Why do they get different treatment? They are leveraging the same pirated works to make money, which was the whole argument for throwing the Pirate Bay admins behind bars for laws that didn’t actually exist in their home country, that they were profiting from piracy. The LLM companies just are making way more money so it’s let go for some reason.
It’s a power play, to show little people can’t get away with it, but if you’ve got millions in venture capital at your back, you can do whatever the fuck you want and people will praise you for it.
In our current society, little people can get away with it. I can take whatever style I want and train a model on it. There’s already many ghibli ressources in the open source scene, and a lot of them date from 2 years ago.
This whole situation is rage bait to manipulate the population into cheering for new copyright laws so politicians get little push back when they start writing pro-corporate laws regarding AI.
https://rufuspollock.com/papers/optimal_copyright_term.pdf
June 15, 2009
Using existing data on recordings and books we obtain a point estimate of around 15 years for optimal copyright term with a 99% confidence interval extending up to 38 years
Some of us have been waiting for copyright laws to be amended downward for 16 years now.
I’m not promoting that corporations should get a free pass, I just want them to be held to the same standards they held the Pirate Bay to if we’re gonna pretend that current copyright laws are good, since the centerpiece of the court case against the Pirate Bay was that they were making money from what they did. OpenAI is making shitloads of money from what they did.
But I’m all for shortening copyright, but not getting rid of it. Reforms don’t have to be pro-corporate slop.
What pirate bay is doing isn’t exactly transformative. I pirate most of my media and can’t say I’m not for better copyright laws and a better treatment of pirate bay, I just think the situations are different.
I don’t think saying “if pirate bay is illegal, so should training ai without compensations” is exactly fair. (I wish the actual people contributing could be compensated, but how it’s set up, we would be giving a few companies a monopoly while compensating mostly data aggregators.)
Reforms don’t have to be pro-corporate slop.
Sadly, the media and most of the population is practically begging for it. When you couple that with the pressure exerted by record companies, publishing houses, etc, it is clear those are the reforms we get if any.
If you download a movie from a torrent site, you have committed an illegal act in the US. It doesn’t matter if you watch the movie and then write a fanfiction based on the movie. It’s the copying that’s illegal. It seems clear from OpenAI’s statements that they torrented the data they used to build their models.
Did you buy the Ghibli movies you trained on or did you pirate them? Because OpenAI has argued that they are allowed to pirate and no one else.
Mostly youtube, reddit and image search. I guess I could just record a Netflix stream if I needed the whole movie. I guess recording a Netflix stream is pirating? Probably easier with a torrent.
What does it matters? I don’t think pirating is unethical especially when it’s not even redistribution but transformative. Openai has never stopped me from pirating or even asked me to stop. Not sure what you mean with “no one else”.
You ever ask yourself if the memes made from movie scenes used pirated media?
Yes recording at Netflix stream is pirating. That you got away with it doesn’t mean you couldn’t be sued for tens of thousands of someone found out.
You don’t think it’s unethical but it is illegal in the US and people have been sued for thousands of dollars. This is still going on today: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/02/isp-sued-by-record-labels-agrees-to-identify-100-users-accused-of-piracy/
OpenAI has said they need to violate copyright. But they didn’t say that the law should be changed. They want an exemption for themselves.
I agree on the double standard. I also think there’s an element of Cory Doctorow’s point that “it’s not a crime of we do it with an app.”
Running an unlicensed taxi service or hotel business? No no we’re not criminals, we’re disrupting stagnant markets!
https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/25/potatotrac/
It’s basically a blanket pass for tech bros to bend and break laws
But they don’t have to rely on personal connections to rig the price of potatoes: they do it through a third-party data-broker called Potatotrac. Each cartel member sends all their commercially sensitive data – supply costs, pricing, sales figures – to Potatotrac, and then Potatotrac uses that data to give “advice” to the cartel members about “optimal pricing.”
This is the real sick stuff, same with RealPage. They’re just offering a service that could allow the businesses they serve to collude, but because they’re just doing it through a third party service it’s suddenly not collusion.
Doctorow pretty spot on as usual. I’m glad he’s come a long way, because I actually kind of disliked his writing on Boing Boing in the early 2000’s because he often got some simple facts wrong. He’s much more thorough and rigorous now.
This kind of price-fixing was central to the enforcement actions of the Biden administration’s trustbusters at the FTC, and their investigations and actions inspired state AGs and private parties to bring their own antitrust suits.
Saddest part of that article. We had someone trying to end this shit, and you brainwashed fuckers hated him for it.
We’re living through the return of the robber barons. This time, however, they can implant their thoughts directly into every single person’s hands at any instant. That’s why your point is the most salient, most important, and most downplayed
White collar crime is always ignored as long as it doesn’t rock the boat too much or isn’t stealing money from the wealthy.
Steal $5 and they shoot you down in the street.
Steal $5,000 they throw you in jail.
Steal $500,000 and they give you a fine.
Steal $50,000,000 and they name a building after you.
Steal $50,000,000,000 and they make you king.
What kind of article is this? They misattributed a quote, then admitted the misattributed the quote, then doubled down on it, and then threw in a political message.
People, this is rage bait. It’s yellow journalism. Don’t fall for this shit.
What quote is misattributed? Also it appears to be a blog post, I don’t really think its intention is to report on the facts but rather provide analysis. Fuck OpenAI for this and many other things, the ire is well deserved.
They give the Miyazaki quote and then say, “of course, he wasn’t talking about generative AI, but he could have been.”
That’s not what misattributed means especially regarding a quote. It would be misattributed if they said someone else’s name. Anyways how is it wrong (or whatever you meant) to say that what he’s saying about an older version of similar tech is applicable to a newer iteration? Either way this isn’t a news article, it’s a blog post. Who cares if it’s editorialized?
Either way this isn’t a news article, it’s a blog post. Who cares if it’s editorialized?
People who would rather hear the truth and not fancy lies that appeal to the masses.
Okay. Have you tried looking elsewhere than a blog post that never claimed to be “the truth”?
Anyways that’s a garbage argument. I’d like to know how you’ve been managing not to find anything opinion based in whatever corner of the internet you’ve come from. If you’re only willing to see things that are anywhere near “the truth” you should be reading an academic publication, not social media.
I don’t get my news from tante.cc
But the fact that I don’t use them for my news doesn’t mean that they’re not lying (“editorializing”) for profit, which is a bad thing for everyone who cares about not being misinformed since people, who do read trash like this, use this kind of ‘news’ as the basis of their opinions.
Thank you omfg I thought I was losing my mind with these comments. the article was a super weird angry read.
If Disney can’t sue for this, then what exactly would be too far? We’re a few steps from being able to animate our own movies in Disney style.
The interesting thing would be an algorithm that is as close to a duplicate as possible without breaking copyright.
Then there’s the fact company like Disney will want to use AI to lower labor costs, while at the same time preventing others from doing the same to them. Given their lobbying what weird laws will that result in?
Too far would be anything outside of fair use. If a user generates an image of a specific copyrighted character, then attempts to make money off of that image, they could be sued.
You can’t copyright a style, but there’s still a lot of legal grey area here.
It’s also worth noting that OpenAI has an indemnification clause in their Terms of Use. This means that if someone else goes after OpenAI for something that went viral and was created by a specific user, OpenAI can then turn around and bill that user for all legal fees incurred by them (whether they win or lose the case).
If anyone is into using AI for anything, I would strongly suggest that they avoid using (or at least publishing/posting about) any of OpenAI’s tools especially while all of these legal issues are still being sorted out.
That linked X post from the White House at the end leaves me speechless.
Utterly inhumaneWe as the people of the united States have to do something. If you aren’t part of a movement yet join one, anyone, most of them are communicating with each other at this point.
OpenAI picked Studio Ghibli because Miyazaki hates their approach.
I highly doubt it. They picked it because the Ghibli style is very popular among users. There’s also no reason to believe that it violates “democratic values”. Since it’s popular, the general population is voting that they LIKE it, not that they oppose it.
Downvote me all you like, but this is trying to put a lot of malice where the simpler explanation is just “money”.
no reason to believe it violates “democratic values”
In my country the law is one of the pillars of democracy, but you do you 👍
The law very, VERY often violates the democratic choices of the people in the United States. That’s what you get when you do FPTP voting schemes.
Money and malice are not a dichotomy. I would say most malice is for monetary reasons.
Of course they aren’t, but the cartoonish levels of moustache-twirling villainy described here are unlikely to be real.
They thought it was cool. They knew it would drive usage and make money. They shit on intellectual property. There is no other explanation needed, nor is it sensible.
Yeah it’s not like this is the only way to generate the style, it’s relatively simple to even do it locally. It’s just popular
Yeah the text makes many freestyle assumptions, although the overall sentiment is correct that these big companies and especially egocentric billionaires do stuff to trigger others simply for power display. I believe the text linked about it being a distraction for the new round of funding is the real reason.
It’s the “you stole my style” artists attacking artists all over again. And digital art isn’t real att/cameras are evil/cgi isn’t real art all over with a more organic and intelligent medium.
The issue is the same as it has always been. Anything and everything is funneled to the rich and the poor blame the poor who use technology, because anthropocentric bias makes it easier to vilify than the assholes building our cage around us.
The apple “ecosystem” has done much more damage than AI artists, but people can’t seem to comprehend how. Also Disney and corpos broke copyright so that its just a way for the rich to own words and names and concepts, so that the poor can’t use them to get ahead.
All art is a remix. Disney only became successful using other artists hard work in the Commons. Now the Commons is a century more out of grasp, so only the rich can own the artists and hoard the growth of art.
Also which artists actually have the time and money to litigate? I guess copyright does help some nepo artists.
Nepotism is the main way to earn your right to invest into becoming an artist that isn’t fatiguing towards collapse of life.
But let’s keep yelling at the technology for being evil.
yeah yeah you ai bros keep crying about how useless artists are but you keep gobbling up datasets full of them! Hypocrites everyone of you! You need them! You crave them to spit more and more useless derivative trash.
Try comprehending what he wrote instead of spewing insults, it might make you smarter. He’s clearly not an AI bro.
Did they specifically allow “Ghibly style?” Or did they just loosen the restrictions on asking for styles in general, and Ghibly style just turned out to be the popular one that memes started snowballing around?
For the longest time OpenAI’s systems would try to block people from generating images in the style of certain artists. This was obviously for copyright reasons, the didn’t want to get sued (even more than they already are). Which is something they just changed very explicitly. You can now easily generate stuff in the style of Studio Ghibli and Sam Altman made his avatar on X-The Nazi Network a ghiblified version of himself.
I don’t have specifics if they have allowed other styles to be used now, too. I don’t use this nonsense, but it’s clear that Ghibli was put front and center.
Yes, I read the article. But it doesn’t answer my question. Did OpenAI specifically enable Ghibli style, or did it remove the restrictions in general?
Everyone’s pulling out Miyazaki’s out-of-context quote about procedural animation and are interpreting this as some kind of personal attack against him in particular because of it, but unless OpenAI specifically made Ghibli style available without lifting restrictions on others I don’t see a reason to assume that.
Also, an article that calls X “The Nazi Network” is not exactly the most reliable source. This isn’t even about X.
https://bleedingcool.com/comics/chatgpt-wont-copy-artist-styles-including-jim-lee-frank-frazetta/
This suggests that all they’ve ever actually been doing is blocking keywords of artists names, and that it has always been trivial to get around such restrictions if you know how to prompt correctly.
I can’t find anything about Ghibli or Miyazaki’s names being on that restricted list.
Also if keyword blocking is the best they could muster, they were never serious about blocking certain styles.
From the article listed, a quote from ChatGPT:
Our policy restricts creating images in the style of artists, creative professionals, or studios whose latest work was created after 1912. Jim Lee’s work falls well after this cutoff date, hence the inability to generate an image based on his style
Right, but the point I’m trying to ask about is whether they’re treating Ghibli specially here. People are reacting as if OpenAI is thumbing its nose specifically at Miyazaki here, whereas the impression I’ve got is that they simply opened the floodgates and dropped restrictions on styling in general.
Style has never been covered by copyright to begin with, so any concerns they might have had about being sued over style would have always been erring on the side of caution. They may simply think that the legal environment has calmed down enough that they won’t be inundated with frivolous lawsuits any more.
I understand what you’re getting at, and this article was the best I could come up with. I think the real problem is that OpenAI is tight lipped about what they allow and don’t allow. As I said, I don’t personally use them, so I’m unfamiliar with if all restrictions are gone or if this is people doing the classic work-around-a-keyword filter. I have a friend who is exceptional about getting past their keyword filters in which he has done things he is definitely not supposed to be able to do.
I’ll see if I can get a hold of him later tonight, because he was generating some stuff in a Ghibli style in the last few days. I’ll ask if the keyword filter is still there and whether this is people just working around it, he would know better than I with first hand experience. Because I am having a hell of a time finding articles that actually detail what changed here.
I think we both want an answer to the same questions but the available writing on such questions is very limited, it seems.
They loosened moderation on style-based prompts. That’s the ‘real’ story. The End. But…
…some users on Reddit/X (hard to pin down exactly where, as these things go) made it a meme to ‘Ghibli-fy’ images because it is easy now (despite being trivially easy to do in ComfyUI for over a year) and then, in an attempt to monetize the meme/outrage, “”“news websites”“” started producing articles like this one were written using old quotes to imply that there is some sort of ongoing drama between OpenAI and Studio Ghibli.
It’s just manufactured drama built on Internet memes and outrage farming media sites.
out-of-context quote about
That didn’t exactly look like animation. Looks like they trained an AI to control a humanoid figure in a virtual environment. It learned completely new and inhuman means of locomotion. Not very impressive from the technical angle, but the pitch about using it as a model for Zombie movement was clever.
You can use that for CG animation, of course. But those bi- and quadrupedal robots are also trained that way.
I feel the filmmakers manufactured some drama there. Knowing the real context of the quote makes it much more sensible.
Is it really a ‘move to allow’ style prompts? They’re just no longer preventing people from doing that.
It’s weird that people who profess to be staunch defenders of art don’t understand that stealing styles is fundamental to art. If enough people steal a specific style then art history just labels it a ‘movement’. Look on this page: https://magazine.artland.com/art-movements-and-styles/ and you can see that the thing they’re describing is a lot of people copying the same style.
Drum and Bass, a music genre, was essentially built on a “”“”“stolen”“”" clip from The Winstons in a song called Amen, Brother. The Amen break (you’ve certainly heard it even if you don’t know the name) is copied over and over and over.
This is just the latest social media trend trying to shoehorn issues into the ‘AI-bad’ meme. Stealing styles is not unusual or even immoral. It is literally the foundation of art.
This is just outrage farming, because 1. People are familiar with this style and 2. The primary artist who made the style popular is against AI.
I see it as enabling people to make images in a style they admire and would like to draw but don’t personally have the skill. To me the concept of copyright is the only difference between AI art generators and say, springy leg braces that let you slam dunk like Kareem Abdul Jabbar. I understand there are business ramifications some people might object to, but I don’t get the moralistic part of the outrage. Maybe somebody can help me understand by explaining it rationally without screaming or calling me names, but spitting rage at me is pointless.
edit: from the abundance of downvotes and lack of explanation I take it people know they’re supposed to be outraged but don’t know why. The telltale mark of meme culture, wear it proudly!
The moralistic outrage is that people still have an outdated concept of intellectual property, and a blanket fear of corporations owning technological progress.
The truth is, no one can actually own an idea or style. But we have laws that try to make it a real thing. Because of regulatory capture, copyright truly only benefits corporations with lots of money, not all the little indie artists that actually would need it.
Hell, most these indie artists make their money drawing and selling fanart, which is the most literal definition of copying. Yet no one worries about that.
Does OpenAI offer the same service in Disney “'Mickey Mousify”
And how has that played out.
It’s a sincere question (I don’t know) though i admit to not trying to learn, as I’ve never played with any of the AI tools
I googled it for you. Yes, they advertise “From Studio Ghibli, Pixar, and Disney Classics to The Simpsons, South Park, and more.” Not sure why everybody is focusing on Studio Ghibli.
AI does not know or create anything. Without stolen training data what would your fancy LLM actually be able to do?
It’s not my LLM, but like most software developers I admit I “stole” the same training data to learn programming.
An insult to life itself.
Title made by the least pretentious American liberal
Cool, another preachy argument that jumps to irrational conclusions. Because Ghibli?
It is a display of power: You as an artist, an animator, an illustrator, a writer, any creative person are powerless. We will take what we want and do what we want. Because we can.
Uh…we always could & did. Imitators have been doing that since always, long before LLMs. No one owns an art style.
This is the idea of might makes right. The banner that every totalitarian and fascist government rallied under.
That’s the argument? Plagiarism & imitating art styles is fascism? Wow! The rest of the article is worse.
Please make the word fascism more meaningless.
just because you can doesn’t mean you should.
I could go out and kill a person for supporting AI IP theft. I won’t because it goes against my moral code.
just goes to prove my theory that anyone that supports this kind of theft is not only devoid of any morals, but lacks the integrity expected of a contributing adult.
It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t, either. It is a fallacy of modal logic to claim an action that is not one that should be done is an action that should not be done.
If we limited ourselves to doing what we should, then entertainment like Ghibli wouldn’t exist, and you wouldn’t write comments here. There’s no reason you should write comments here, yet you did. Does that mean you’re “devoid of any morals” & “lack the integrity expected of a contributing adult”?
Imitation & derivative works hardly rise to anything worth fussing or losing total perspective over. If we pay attention, all human creativity is derivative, nothing is truly original. Works build on & reference each other. Techniques get refined. It’s why we have genres. From the Epic of Gilgamesh & ancient mythology to modern storytelling, or the development of perspective in graphical works across time, there’s a clear process of imitation & development across all of it.
Oddly enough, Princess Mononoke is inspired by the Cedar Forest guardian Humbaba from the Epic of Gilgamesh. Should we also condemn Ghibli’s “lack of integrity” for their “intellectual property theft” from the ancient Mesopotamians?
If Ghibli were somehow deprived of economic gain & welfare due to others passing off derived work as their own, then you might have a point. However, I doubt when they sincerely want to watch Ghibli, people decide instead to watch LLM generated stills on social media that no one would pay for. They’re no substitute for real, creative output. If anything, the increased exposure stirs interest in the real work of Ghibli. Even the objection is speculation: the article doesn’t state Miyazaki objected, it merely argued he would. So, no, you don’t have a real point here, either.
This is as much “theft” as any other imitative, derivative expression. I’ll take free speech over decrying fake “theft”.
You know, I didn’t actually read your comment, but I glanced through enough to know you’re just making excuses for shitty behavior due to a lack of integrity.
the way it was written follows a pretty well known pattern, and I’m almost positive it was mostly written by an LLM.
sad really, people put effort into their responses on here and people who use LLMs just come along with some generated garbage and shit all over the platform.
Well, you’re wrong.
image of text
no alt text
people with accessibility needs can’t read thisAnd you’re ableist for that. Good job.
more images of text alt text that misleads people with accessibility needs
So just to be clear
- false “IP theft” (derivative works in a similar style aren’t theft) that harms no one violates your moral code
- discrimination that objectively disadvantages the disabled is fine to you.
Much can be understood about someone’s sense of morality in their actions (eligible for moral consideration) toward the disadvantaged. Does that person treat others as that person would want to be treated by them? Do they prioritize a cause that doesn’t address a credible harm over their easily addressable actions that do cause credible harm?
Your moral code & moral claims seem confused & mistaken.
you’re a bad troll.
first of all, the entire thread was about AI IP theft. you threw in a red herring just to make personal attacks against me as being abelist.
in-fact, from what I’ve seen in your comment history, when you are challenged you claim abelism.
it’s really pathetic and gives differently-abled people a bad name. you should be ashamed of yourself, but we all know trolls feed off of the shame.
Exactly this is so frustrating that people fall in for copyright propaganda just because “big tech is bad”.
Ghibli doesn’t own a style. It has sbeen made by thousands of animators and millions of illustrations and influences before them.
This is not the way to get back at big tech.
Imitators have been doing that since always, long before LLMs
Fill me in a bit. Are you under the impression that artists are particularly okay with/enjoy people imitating their art style?
As an artist, when people imitate me, I take it as flattery.
When a machine imitates me, I take it as an insult to life itself.
When a machine imitates me, I take it as an insult to life itself.
I might be flattered that someone bothered to make a machine do that. Massaging software to do that also takes skill?
When GitHub Copilot lifts my opensource code, I’m not offended. I only cringe a bit when it’s bad code I regret committing.
I take it as flattery
I respect your position, and I appreciate people who are willing to share their creativity in an inspiring way like that.
However, others don’t see it as flattery. Particularly in eastern cultures, it is seen as mockery or plagiarism. You can choose to disagree about why they don’t want you to imitate their style, but you should always respect the request.
If eastern cultures don’t like imitation, why are there a million identical isekai light novels with an average joe who dies, reincarnates in a slightly altered Dungeons and Dragons world, and gets a harem of women with huge breasts whose personalities are taken straight from TVtropes?
Because humans suck?
Fair.
This is an absolutely rational take.
Individual, noncommercial imitation is flattery.
LLM ripoff is exactly that.
Are we pretending this is new & their opinion matters in some new way it hasn’t before?
There might be an argument to demand licensing royalties on intellectual property. Is that too capitalist? Maybe it’s fine if we work that into the word fascism somehow, wear it out a bit more to hit that sweet spot. Ooh.
No. We’re acting as if their opinion always mattered just as much as it does now.
While your style is not, can not, and should not be your intellectual property, you should have the right to say “I don’t want you to imitate my exact style” and people should respect that.
We’re acting as if their opinion always mattered just as much as it does now.
So not at all: got it.
you should have the right to say “I don’t want you to imitate my exact style”
You do.
people should respect that
“That’s just like your opinion, man.” meme goes here.
The argument seems to amount to “stop using/imitating my work to express yourself in ways I don’t like”, which is futile & senseless.
So, to recap, your position is this:
Artists do not deserve the respect that would allow them to be creative unfettered. Gotcha.
How does “respect” “allow” an artist “unfettered creativity”? How exactly is instructing others how to treat/imitate their work & expecting their wishes to be fulfilled promoting “unfettered creativity”? Seems like the opposite. Can you break that down into logic?
Are you suggesting artists are fragile beings whose creativity only exists at the mercy of our “respect” and the slightest disrespect breaks them? That seems rather self-important.
I submit that artists don’t need our respect to be creative: the suggestion is belittling to artists.
The real point is the article fails to argue well.
I didn’t say they needed respect to be creative. I said they needed respect to be creative unfettered.
I’m suggesting that disrespecting an artists wishes causes them unnecessary struggles which in turn unnecessarily makes it more difficult for them to do their work.
I think it is also a kind of “you did a nice thing there, so I’ll act as if I can do the same” display.
Nah information should be free. Ghibli doesn’t own its style. Fuck this copyright propaganda machine.
Potentially unpopular opinion, but I don’t think art or artstyles should be copyrighted.
They aren’t, thankfully
